The great dividing rage of the left

There’s no doubt now of the threat of this shameful, futile culture war.

A woman walks past a mural of George Floyd in Berlin's Mauer Park. Picture: AFP

The culture wars matter, they always have. But now we are seeing why.

In recent times the media/political class has often denigrated the cultural warriors of the right for daring to defend Western civilisation, the primacy of the nation-state and the relative success of the liberal democratic model.

Yet there is a noisy rabble ever eager to tear down what has been built, and they are encouraged by enemies abroad.

Since the early days of the great republic, it has been said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. There are always forces of subversion and anarchy chipping away at what liberal democracies have achieved in order to experiment with failed or new ideologies.

Freedom of speech is one of our most cherished and fundamental liberties, on which the health of all else depends, yet it is constantly undermined through legal constraints such as the human rights apparatus, extension of defamation interpretations, national security provisions and, most perniciously, through a corralling of academic and media discussions by politically correct thought police.

For examples we can look to the University of Queensland suspending Drew Pavlou over his defence of minorities and democracy campaigners in China. Or we could look at the ABC’s Media Watch program actively campaigning to constrain reporting on climate change, border protection, coronavirus research and coverage of Donald Trump.

A statue of British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill is boarded up on Parliament square in central London on June 12.

The capture of our cultural institutions, from the university sector to the ABC and the broader bureaucracy, by the green left has deepened the divide between the so-called elites and the mainstream.

Just as they do in other liberal democracies, these processes divide us into warring factions: the mainstream valuing the national project and focusing on practical progress, versus vocal minorities revolting against institutions, obsessed with grievances, committed to gestures and demonstrating disdain for the national project by attacking links to the past and judging historical acts by current standards.

For a crowded couple of months, we saw a unity of purpose in this nation as almost everyone co-operated to hunker down and slow the spread of the coronavirus. The partisan divide disappeared as the media/political class welcomed a Coalition government opting for large-scale government interventions to isolate people and compensate them for the economic consequences of social-distancing measures.

But the great divide is back already, sharper than ever, as we emerge to embrace a new COVID-19 normal. Mainstream values again are shunned, mocked and misunderstood by a media/political class deeply entranced by a sense of its own superiority, expressed through interventionist policies, ideological posturing and endless virtue signalling.

The epitome of this mindset was seen in the four Labor and two Greens federal politicians — Graham Perrett, Anika Wells, Malarndirri McCarthy, Warren Snowdon, Janet Rice and Mehreen Faruqi — who decided they could flout social-distancing measures, attend protests in various cities, then head to Canberra for parliament.

Back in March Perrett was on social media criticising people apparently breaking social-distancing rules at Bondi Beach, referring to it as a “matter of life and death”. Yet he took it on himself to ignore the same rules so he could make a political point at a mass rally — then he foisted his risk-taking on to unsuspecting others by flying to the nation’s capital.

Now we know at least one protester in Melbourne was carrying more than a placard, so it is clear Rice risked taking the virus to Parliament House. This is the example of social responsibility set by the politicians.

Apparently there is one rule for us and another for the so-called green-left elites. Yet these politicians and their many media supporters do not seem to comprehend how this has less to do with any medical risks (given infection rates are so low) and everything to do with deliberately ignoring restrictions that others have adhered to at great sacrifice.

Mainstream Australians have lost their jobs, closed their businesses, worked from home, skipped the funerals of loved ones, abandoned Easter services, missed marching on Anzac Day, cancelled holidays, and the list goes on. Along the way they have been warned off beaches, fined for walking in parks and treated like delinquents by overzealous authorities. But the protesters were free to mingle in their thousands, and the Labor and Greens politicians chose to join them.

One rule for the mainstream, another for those who want to put their virtue on parade.

This point stands regardless of the purpose of the protests — the issue or topic of their protest is irrelevant. As we saw on Anzac Day, other options could have been found to attract attention and display commitment to a cause. In any event, while focused on real national challenges such as appallingly high indigenous incarceration rates, these protests sprang up opportunistically on the back of understandable outrage in the US over the killing of African-American George Floyd.

Yet, just as most journalists failed to call out adequately the violence and rioting in the US for fear of being seen to question the cause, the coverage of the Australian protests has tended to accept their imperative. Especially at the ABC, of course, there was only amplification of the protesters’ grievances rather than any sense of the indignation from the rest of the community.

When Finance Minister Mathias Cormann gave vent to what would have been the dominant mainstream reaction, he was denounced as divisive. “I think it is incredibly selfish, it’s incredibly self-indulgent and it does impose an unnecessary and unacceptable risk on the community,” Cormann said. Outside the rarefied atmosphere of the media/political class there would have been nothing but head nods around the country to this perfectly reasonable observation, but journalists dragged out the “dog-whistle” cliche.

Forget Labor and Liberal, right and left, progressive and conservative; this divide between the media/political class and the mainstream is the schism that matters in our political debate. Scott Morrison has shown repeatedly that he understands this but it is a constant challenge because the world in which politics operates is the epitome of the problem — the Prime Minister’s constant refer­ences to the Canberra bubble provide an effective reminder for his troops.

Most Australians would never have marched in a protest and never will. The protesters are usually habitual.

Most Australians would like to have more than 50 people at their funeral, be able to cross state borders to visit loved ones, or go to a pub, concert or footy match. Instead they play by the rules, make the sacrifices, then watch the woke warriors gather with impunity.

The enablers and encouragers of the media/political class are the academics and they have shown this week how their own posturing can turn around and bite them on the bum. China’s latest attempt to punish Australia for daring to share curiosity about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has been to warn its students away from our country because of anti-Asian racism.

It is a deliberately misleading and vicious ploy but, should evidence be required, it will find plenty from our universities. The obsession of our institutions with identity and race issues has seen them seek out and amplify every possible aspect and episode of racism for years.

Writing in The Conversation last month, for instance, Monash University’s Susan Carland warned of a looming spike in ­bigotry. “In Australia, the historical precedence of the recession-­racism link, coupled with our current struggles with race issues, means our nation is primed for strife.” she said.

Beijing could do worse than to paste that into its next media release. Universities that shun a centre for Western civilisation but have embraced centres for Asian, Chinese or Islamic studies have cast their votes in the culture wars. They are afraid or unwilling to embrace our cultural heritage because if they discuss Western civilisation’s strengths, they might have to apologise for its faults or mistakes.

Instead, they opt for surrender and leave the cultural battlefield to the zealots, ideologues and anarchists. While Pavlou takes his university suspension to the courts, who will fill his shoes on campus to resist Chinese communist intimidation?

As statues are torn down and vandalised in the US and Britain, which historical figure will meet contemporary demands for perfection? James Cook, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Victoria, Martin Luther King Jr, Robert Kennedy or Cleopatra? It is nonsense. Flawed people achieve great things, and neither their achievements nor their sins disappear when a statue is torn down or a university seminar redirects the narrative.

The battlegrounds in the public square are not representative of the primary trends or concerns in the broader population.

They are evidence of the cheapening of our education system, the self-indulgence of the so-called elites and the inability of politicians to overwhelm this media/political class.

Elections usually provide the correctives as long as there is someone brave enough to wear the opprobrium and resist the enticements of the media/political class to put their hand up for mainstream aspirations. If he successfully stays on the right side of this chasm, Morrison will be a long-serving Prime Minister.

Labor’s only opportunity lies in reclaiming the mainstream it has negligently surrendered to the ­Coalition. It needs to heed the lessons and emulate the positioning of Bob Hawke; but the only contemporary Labor figure who seemed to grasp this was Mark Latham, and we all know where he ended up.